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I am not going to say anything further except that the Ukraine\Russia conflict now has drawn in international casualties. The repercussions are global in scope and as well as the unprecedented ground offensive in Gaza, we now have emergency COBRA meetings, NATO exercises in the Black Sea and McCain saying there will be hell to pay. Well, yes there will. For everyone. For anyone in need of any clarification of terminology, this is what you call a world war.

I am not going to say anything further except that the Ukraine\Russia conflict now has drawn in international casualties. The repercussions are global in scope and as well as the unprecedented ground offensive in Gaza, we now have emergency COBRA meetings, NATO exercises in the Black Sea and McCain saying there will be hell to pay. Well, yes there will. For everyone. For anyone in need of any clarification of terminology, this is what you call a world war.

You do realize that this would not be the first time Russia has shot down a passenger jet, right? Ditto for an Israeli invasion of Gaza.

For me, I think that Christianity was basically a Hellenized Jewish mystery cult. It's all about the individual attaining immortality through the suffering of the God-man, Jesus Christ (who may not have existed in history, btw). You do that, in part, through the mystery (still the world used by Greeks for the Sacraments) of the Eucharist. The idea that Jesus at the last supper was, as you say, a historical character who was simply foreshadowing what was to happen to him the next day might have been just what Christians would tell outsiders to not freak them out or get in trouble with the authorities. Being secretive was how all these cults operated in the Greco-Roman world. Inductees in the cult only would get in on the salvation/eternal life/incense/chalice of blood-wine hocus pocus stuff.

Iniquity.

You're completely right, of course, that there is a church-wide conspiracy to cover up for rape factories. But to use all that flowery language that basically calls the church the Whore of Babylon is hyperbolic. The church is not an apocalyptically powerful institution like it might have been in the Renaissance or under the Christian Roman/Byzantine emperors.

Using that language does a real disservice to the discussion. The problem of rape/abuse/cover-up has a relatively straightforward sociological/psychological etiology. It's the same behavior we witness in countless other patriarchal institutions, from Penn State to the BBC to your friendly neighborhood rapey-cover-upy family. No need to invoke the book of Revelation or Machiavelli, for fuck's sake.

That's all a bit too Donnie Darko for me, I'm afraid.

I have really different views from you. Most of the evil we see in the world is the result of human greed, vanity and shortsightedness, not Pure Evil™ to manipulate world events with an eye to ending life on earth forever.

Fuck it, why not...

Secretive cults in the past, secretive cults in the present. Whether the breaking of the bread was symbolic or whether the entire Bible is symbolic, everything is interconnected. The word, the sound, existing in the beginning and saying let there be light, is a lot like the idea of string theory, that everything being vibration at its base caused light to be the earliest material thing in existence after the Big Bang. The virgin that gave birth to Jesus, the light of the world, may be akin to space, which has no thing in it (as a virgin would) expanding like a pregnant womb would to disperse matter and causing the existence of everything, while simultaneously not being the actual creator of everything, but instead the dark feminine conduit that everything naturally just comes out of. Like the void of Buddhism or the Sophia of the Gnostic gospels. The omnipresent, conscious energy giving rise to all of matter is basically the Higgs field described in arcane language. The word Catholic supposedly means universal. The battle between God and Satan is more or less the battle between fear and love, yin and yang, especially since God is literally said to be love in the Bible. Yes, love eventually prevails, but fear puts up a hell of a fight in trying to win, and that is what we are seeing today more than ever. I could go on and on, but I feel like this is probably far too Donnie Darko.

Inequity, iniquity... how about both.

The Catholic Church is extremely powerful in this day and age for a trinity of reasons. Firstly, the sheer amount of followers it has, secondly, the amount of secret knowledge it has, and thirdly, the fact that it is the richest institution in the world by an amazing margin in a world where money talks via whispers behind closed doors. Before he was pontiff, the Pope was against gay marriage. I know this because I read up on the candidates' policies before the choice was made. Now he is all for it, all for twitter, all for atheists being saved... it's because nowadays you win by using covert social manipulation instead of brute force, which you used to be able to do, back when the best way to communicate was word of mouth and you could get away with being so straightforward in achieving your goals.

In all of these inherently social scenarios, inherently social behaviours are at work, including and especially Machiavellian ones. You can talk about it as a proverbial whore, you can talk about it hyperbolically, you can talk about it in a non exaggerated manner as if it is something where the gravity of it should not be exaggerated, you can draw it with crayons or express in in interpretive dance, the facts are the facts - it is totally abominable, and if I have to resort to language like that to get my feelings across I will.

The problem there is that people are either ignorantly, mindlessly evil like you describe, or they are consciously evil because they don't need to work, have been loaded since birth and have nothing else to do, or believe they are actually doing good. If you have two sides in a fight, both think they are right, otherwise nobody would ever fight, would they? Whether people are evil or whether evil is a force which acts through people, or whether it's an extension into human nature of the often cruel way that worldly nature operates, or whether it is defined relative to culture, time or whoever wins and writes the history books, there is something which is definitely not good rearing its ugly head on this planet today. And people don't want to think of it, because they are afraid to. If they had gotten over that a long time ago maybe this shit wouldn't be happening right now.

You do realize that this would not be the first time Russia has shot down a passenger jet, right? Ditto for an Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Maybe not the first time but probably the last. If I could somehow prove the future I would, but I have been saying for about a year that we are going to go down the shitter and nobody wants to hear it or admit it, not even when it is happening. I'm just going to leave it alone now, because there is absolutely no glory in being right about something like this and trying to tell someone something they refuse to believe is the mechanism behind all of the world's current problems anyway.

I am not going to say anything further except that the Ukraine\Russia conflict now has drawn in international casualties. The repercussions are global in scope and as well as the unprecedented ground offensive in Gaza, we now have emergency COBRA meetings, NATO exercises in the Black Sea and McCain saying there will be hell to pay. Well, yes there will. For everyone. For anyone in need of any clarification of terminology, this is what you call a world war.

Did you feel this doom and gloom back in the shiny happy pre-9/11 1990s when a million Rwandans were slaughtered or 100,000+ people were dying in wars on the European continent?

Believing an apocalypse is going to take place soon, as well as doomsday / "the world is gonna end" thinking, is very common, and something of all ages, Zippo. That doesn't make you any more right than people that believed in december 2012, or whenever. At any rate, if something like that happens, it probably will be a completely random terrestrial or cosmic event what casts the human race into oblivion, like a meteor shower, or the core of the earth demagnetizing (talking complete bs here just for the sake of the argument), not something set in motion by secret cults. Also, if you believe in "vibration" that stems from the big bang, is there any good without evil? That is what the bible means, I think, with "he gives and he takes away". "It's all good" is a Gwyneth Paltrow anthem, and she's not very smart.

At least 154 173 dutchies died on that plane yesterday, a lot of them on their way to the AIDS 2014 conference. It was most likely shot from the sky. This sucks. I´m desperately waiting for the manifest to be made public.

"Replies are a combination of nonsense, unrelated comments and inside jokes"‎

Secretive cults in the past, secretive cults in the present. Whether the breaking of the bread was symbolic or whether the entire Bible is symbolic, everything is interconnected. The word, the sound, existing in the beginning and saying let there be light, is a lot like the idea of string theory, that everything being vibration at its base caused light to be the earliest material thing in existence after the Big Bang. The virgin that gave birth to Jesus, the light of the world, may be akin to space, which has no thing in it (as a virgin would) expanding like a pregnant womb would to disperse matter and causing the existence of everything, while simultaneously not being the actual creator of everything, but instead the dark feminine conduit that everything naturally just comes out of. Like the void of Buddhism or the Sophia of the Gnostic gospels. The omnipresent, conscious energy giving rise to all of matter is basically the Higgs field described in arcane language. The word Catholic supposedly means universal. The battle between God and Satan is more or less the battle between fear and love, yin and yang, especially since God is literally said to be love in the Bible. Yes, love eventually prevails, but fear puts up a hell of a fight in trying to win, and that is what we are seeing today more than ever. I could go on and on, but I feel like this is probably far too Donnie Darko.

It is so very Donnie Darko and also The Matrix.

I just can't get behind all that, not even symbolically. It's too simplistic. (Love prevailing in the end? B'what??) I'm more with the materialists/physicalists. Watch this Gore Vidal video!

Inequity, iniquity... how about both.

Sure. But "iniquity" is the word used when you're castigating the Great Whore of Babylon.

The Catholic Church is extremely powerful in this day and age for a trinity of reasons. Firstly, the sheer amount of followers it has, secondly, the amount of secret knowledge it has, and thirdly, the fact that it is the richest institution in the world by an amazing margin in a world where money talks via whispers behind closed doors. Before he was pontiff, the Pope was against gay marriage. I know this because I read up on the candidates' policies before the choice was made. Now he is all for it, all for twitter, all for atheists being saved... it's because nowadays you win by using covert social manipulation instead of brute force, which you used to be able to do, back when the best way to communicate was word of mouth and you could get away with being so straightforward in achieving your goals.

In all of these inherently social scenarios, inherently social behaviours are at work, including and especially Machiavellian ones. You can talk about it as a proverbial whore, you can talk about it hyperbolically, you can talk about it in a non exaggerated manner as if it is something where the gravity of it should not be exaggerated, you can draw it with crayons or express in in interpretive dance, the facts are the facts - it is totally abominable, and if I have to resort to language like that to get my feelings across I will.

The problem there is that people are either ignorantly, mindlessly evil like you describe, or they are consciously evil because they don't need to work, have been loaded since birth and have nothing else to do, or believe they are actually doing good. If you have two sides in a fight, both think they are right, otherwise nobody would ever fight, would they? Whether people are evil or whether evil is a force which acts through people, or whether it's an extension into human nature of the often cruel way that worldly nature operates, or whether it is defined relative to culture, time or whoever wins and writes the history books, there is something which is definitely not good rearing its ugly head on this planet today. And people don't want to think of it, because they are afraid to. If they had gotten over that a long time ago maybe this shit wouldn't be happening right now.

Or…you've not been paying attention and are young and the typical, bullshit way the world is run and has always been run (Israel invaded Gaza in 2009, for fuck's sake) is coming to you as a big surprise.

The Americans on the USS Vincennes erroneously shot down an Iran Air Flight 655 - a passenger jet with hundreds aboard in 1988, then acted like the moronic troops who downed it were fucking heroes, only later quietly paying out compensation to the families. The Iranian revenge was the organsation of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 which fell on the town of Lockerbie. The USSR shot down Korean Air Flight 007 in 1983, claiming it was violating Sovet airspace for the purpose of spying. Again, hundreds dead. All this has happened before. It's not a world war. We are not at war with Ukraine or Russia. If anything, this will encourage Putin to reign in his special forces, sorry, 'rebels' in Ukraine, or at least throw a few of them under the bus for diplomatic reasons. Compensation will be sought and paid. If you're young enough, all this will seem new and shocking and like armageddon but please read and dig a little, eh? By read, I mean actual history books (Waterstones has shelves of them), not tinfoil conspiracy sites trying to tie current events into a nice neat bow to serve some dubious agenda or just scare the shite out of the stupid.The world has always been full of political clusterfucks of epic proportions. Go google 'Ukrainian Insurgent Army', for example. Lively, overtly hostile nationalist bunch from the 1940s. Put the boot into the Nazis, the Commies, the Jews, the Poles (ethnic cleansing style) and the Czechs. You'll notice their flag is being waved around during this conflict too. Again, all this has happened before, all this will happen again.

The Russia/Ukraine thing could still result in a war on a larger scale of course (chances are big there are still about 100 nucleair warheads in Ukranian possession), but still, it won't be an "apocalypse" nor "long term human devised apocalypse" by a longshot.

"Replies are a combination of nonsense, unrelated comments and inside jokes"‎

Helen. I said right from the first moment that this particular clusterfuck started happening that the pro-Russian separatists were actually a covert Russian operation. I was repeatedly told that was nonsense and that it is something that would be said by a crazy conspiracy website. Well, it is true. So is the old tinfoil hat trope about the British parliament being full of old creepy paedophiles. So were the perhaps most enjoyed ramblings of crazy people, that the government were spying on us and reading our thoughts - well, if that is not what the NSA is doing, please explain to me what they are doing. And if they are justified in doing so, in the name of counter terrorism, then explain to me why they are unable to track or stop from travelling those who want to fight for ISIS.

The reason I kept saying the thing about the separatists despite ridicule and frustration from supposedly more 'rational' people is because I am very well aware of the fact that what politicians and media spin are saying is very different from the agenda held by those in power. Whether that is the leader themselves, the cyberepsionage agencies behind them, military advisors, the lobbyists who funded their trip into office, corrupt politicians around them... It really does not matter who "they" are. The history books are all well and good but what is going on right now is happening so rapidly, and unlike the 90s we now have the power of the internet in most people's pockets. Everyone has an opinion, everyone is watching, the world leaders have more pressure on them than ever before, and there is so much disinformation from all sides along with methods for finding out the actual truth so that the end result is they know things that we do not, but the masses are desparate for answers and so have to be fed lies, but are able to find out the truth themselves. If you read the history books you will know that never before has there been such a thing as Wikileaks, or the Arab Spring, or global nuclear weapon proliferation. Nagasaki and Hiroshima is a very different kettle of fish - it has been decades since then and not only have weapons become unimaginably more brutal since, they are also everywhere.

Contrary to what it seems like people are trying to tell me, I am not a fucking idiot, and apart from the fact that it is patronising to repeatedly point out someone's age as a reason behind why they know nothing about the world, I could just as easily point out that those of an older generation see this as similar to the Cold War type scenario when in fact it is blatantly more violatile. Every single aspect is totally different except the word nuclear. The whole Ukraine thing started off because of the corruption of Yanukovych, which really makes hardly any sense, since Tymoshenko was imprisoned for corruption and then ran for President upon Yanukovych being ousted, and lost to an oligarch. Ukraine has been a corrupt country for a long time. Protesters were shot at by what were allegedly his people, but who knows since we know that gunmen can be one thing operating under a different name and often are. It depends on what side you are on whether you call things like this a coup or a revolution but whatever it was it was not constitutional either by Ukrainian or US terms. However, the US supported Yanukovych being run out of the country because their interests lie in having Ukraine as part of the EU-US partnership so that NATO (which you have to wonder, who exactly was it there to protect against after the collapse of the Soviet Union?) can surround Russia with its weapons, ensuring victory in a preemptive (a tactic Bush and Blair, right and left, are infamous for) nuclear war strike on Russia from just outside its territory. Putin has been an agitation for a while because of Syria and because he seems to be rocking the global boat a bit, rather boldly. However, it was America who funded the Syrian rebels, thus leading to ISIS, it was America who got rid of leaders like Gaddafi right the way back to Saddam. I do not care what anyone says about the status of those people as dictators, it was Bush and Blair who were war criminals and it was NOT their region of the world to get involved in, and they HAVE made things worse. At one time talking about oil being their motive was called a conspiracy theory, by some people it still is. Please. And lest we forget that Siberia is also rich in many resources.

I would also like someone to address the fact that on top of all this, antibiotics are beginning to fail miserably, and there will be no. Such. Thing. As. Modern. Medicine if\when that happens. Read this sentence twice if you have to: THIS IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY, it is happening, it is real.